Politkovskaya murder trial proceeds with third jury

More
than seven years after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the prominent Novaya Gazeta journalist, a jury is
hearing the case against five defendants in the killing. The suspects were
first announced in 2011, but proceedings did not begin until July 2013, amid controversy. Three of the current defendants
were earlier acquitted of Politkovskaya's murder in a 2009 trial.

Among the five men currently being
tried are three ethnic Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail, Ibragim, and Rustam
Makhmudov, whom authorities accuse of executing the murder. Investigators
allege that Rustam Makhmudov was the gunman, while Dzhabrail and Ibragim
Makhmudov were his accomplices. Other suspects being tried in the case are
Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, the Makhmudov brothers' uncle, who is accused of receiving
the order to kill the journalist from an unidentified mastermind and organizing
the hit; and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police officer with the Moscow
Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and a suspected accomplice in the
murder. The latter two men are already serving jail terms on unrelated charges.
Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov were previously
acquitted in Politkovskaya's murder when a jury found the prosecution's
evidence against them flawed and insufficient.

All five defendants in this
new trial have denied the current charges against them and pleaded not guilty,
according to news reports.

A sixth suspect in the
case--former police Lt. Col. Dmitry
Pavlyuchenkov, who was originally charged with organizing the 2006 killing--was sentenced on December 14, 2012, in a deal that Politkovskaya's family
and colleagues said prevented the solving of the crime by precluding the
identification of its true masterminds. Pavlyuchenkov's trial was a two-day,
secret proceeding, in which the former police official, under an
arrangement he made with investigators, was tried as an accomplice in the crime
rather than a key culprit. According to the deal, Pavlyuchenkov was obligated
to fully confess his role in the murder and name its mastermind, Novaya
Gazeta said. The journalist's family and colleagues said Pavlyuchenkov did
not fulfill those conditions, but their appeals to invalidate the deal have
been denied. Also under Pavlyuchenkov's deal with investigators, journalists
were allowed in court only for the opening and closing statements; leaving all
substantive deliberations and testimony in the former colonel's trial sealed from
the public.

A Moscow City Court judge
sentenced Pavlyuchenkov to 11
years in a maximum-security prison and ordered him to pay moral damages of
3,000,000 rubles (US$96,786) to Politkovskaya's adult children, Ilya
and Vera, who said they found the sentence too
lenient.

Against this backdrop of lowered
expectations, the trial of the five suspects is now proceeding in Moscow City Court.
The trial started in the summer of 2013 but was disrupted when the prosecution
and defense could not agree on the jury selection. The second jury was then
suddenly dismissed when it became clear that the Makhmudov brothers' defense was winning over
the jury to the detriment of the prosecution, according to local press reports.

The trial started in earnest
in January, with the formation of now a third jury in the
case.
In the preceding months, the lead lawyer for the Makhmudov brothers, Murad
Musayevhad, found himself the subject of a criminal
investigation for allegedly bribing jury members in an unrelated case. Musayev has denied
the accusations and said they were an attempt to take him off the
Politkovskaya case and prevent him from clearing his clients.

The current trial has not attracted
much media attention despite the fact that the hearings are open to the public.
This could be due to the time that has elapsed since the journalist was shot and killed in the elevator of her Moscow
apartment. And despite the fact that the case is now proceeding relatively smoothly,
both Politkovskaya's colleagues and her family insist that Pavlyuchenkov's closed-door
testimony is an important missing ingredient. That testimony is now unattainable
because the Russian code of criminal procedure precludes it, but it could have
led to the prosecution of the true masterminds of the murder.

But Novaya Gazeta Deputy Editor Sergei Sokolov, the journalist who has
overseen the paper's own investigation into Politkovskaya's killing from the
start, says there is one more chance to question Pavlyuchenkov. In the near
future, Sokolov told CPJ, Pavlyuchenkov will be questioned in another
case, the 2004 murder in Moscow of U.S. journalist and former Forbes-Russia editor Paul Klebnikov. If
Pavlyuchenkov tries to reach a similar deal in the Klebnikov case as he did in
the Politkovskaya case, "Novaya Gazeta
will insist that the deal be made possible only if Pavlyuchenkov names the
masterminds in both the Klebnikov and Polikovskaya murders," Sokolov told CPJ.

Elena Milashina is an award-winning, investigative journalist with Novaya Gazeta and a Moscow correspondent for CPJ.

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